


Proserpina (dal frutto tuo fatal)

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: To Die as Lovers May [4]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Blood, Cisswap, Cunnilingus, Dark, F/F, More than you're thinking, Post-QotD, Rule 63, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:08:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7762609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny Molloy visits Louisa at her little hovel in New Orleans, and wonders what went wrong.<br/>The finely tailored black clothes, the perfect, urbane, shining image of the vampire have all fallen by the wayside, but she's still in love with the woman buried beneath--whoever that is.<br/>Well, it's not as though Danny's the same anymore, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proserpina (dal frutto tuo fatal)

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from [Proserpina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proserpine_\(Rossetti_painting\)) (painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and its accompanying sonnet.

**New Orleans** **  
** **1991**

Danny wondered, sometimes, why she bothered visiting Louisa. She did it once, maybe twice a month; no more. Careful with the calendar to make sure it wasn't too much or too often.

Because Louisa had been different, when they met. Back in '72, she'd been...perfect. Polished, in her fitted black skirt, fluffy white blouse with a little black ribbon at the throat, long long hair spilling down and blending into her velvet capelet. Immaculate lipstick had left pomegranate smears on Danny's neck, under the blood. She’d been perfect, unattached, and there to tell 20-year-young Danny all the secrets she'd never known she thirsted for.

Now?

She was still so beautiful when Danny ventured  down to her place at the end of a dead-end street. With her hair cut short and her clothes worn gossamer-thin (she'd kept the same shirt on three months in a row, once, before it 'fell to pieces'), she was still the most gorgeous woman Danny'd ever wanted. But she didn't look at Danny anymore. Nor talk as she had, that night.

Danny had been caught in those poison-green eyes all those years ago, a version of her etched at the moment of death even though her body kept on for another decade. Louisa had made her. Owned her. And now when they spoke as fellow vampires, Louisa did all she could to avoid making eye contact.

Naturally, that only made Danny the Perverse want it more.

The house where Louisa lived could only barely be qualified as such, the couch where Danny sat crumbling to dust like everything else.

"It's like a tomb," she couldn't keep herself from saying, the lack of heat in the room barely noticeable against her dead skin (stolen, all of it, and kept in her eyes as she watched Louisa move with mortal hesitance).

"Fitting, I suppose," was all Louisa said, coming to sit across from her in a spindly-legged chair. 

"You're not dead," Danny pointed out, ignoring Louisa's droll gaze. "You know what I mean. There's no point in living like this."

"You sound just like them." She smiled, too sad.

"I just want to know why." What could have taken the shine off of that perfect veneer? Just Lestat’s return to the land of the living?

"Why?" Louisa bit her lip, sensual, and looked at the dead fireplace.

"Why you  _ changed. _ Why you're not--" Danny was being indelicate, but it had been years.  _ Years _ of careful visits, circumspect interactions seeking not to violate unremarked boundaries.

"Not like I used to be?" Louisa smiled, beautiful and bitter, and at least that was the same. "Danielle--"

"Danny."

"Danny." Tongue flicked out to wet full lips as though savoring the familiarity Danny'd never thought needed to be spoken aloud. "I'd been watching you for weeks. You listened to women, took their little stories down with your recorder."

"I--" her throat went dry at the thought. Stalked, Jesus, stalked--"I never saw you."

"That's why." Eyes like flames in a skull, and Danny stood by that description no matter how little sense it had ever made. "I dressed for you."

The perfect, immaculate image of the vampire: pale and trim and dressed in black, just as Louisa had said Lestat prescribed for their kind. Louisa had as good as told her. 

But then, she'd been busy imagining that Louisa was telling her other things. "I guess I was special after all," she laughed, well past hiding the bitterness of it.  

"You were nothing like I expected." Louisa's gaze was on her at last, not looking off to some distant dead memory. "All those nights I watched you did nothing to prepare me for the reality of sitting in that room." 

"Then why didn't you do it?" she shot back, falling into old habits. Old, rutted wounds. 

"I couldn't. I knew your face, and your name. I couldn't have borne killing you." 

"That's not what I meant. You  _ know _ that's not what I meant." She was standing. "You. You made it sound--I thought--I fell in love with you!"

"Fell in love with something. An image; a body dressed as what you desired. And for that--" The eyes were off her again, staring intently at a cracked window spattered with dirt. "For that, I am sorry. I didn’t want to tempt you to that end."

There was so much there to protest; the idea that it was the look of Louisa that Danny had loved. That it had been the clothes and the body, not the story and the intimacy, the feeling that she was *special* to this rare indestructible fragile creature, dressed now in a tiered skirt and a thin greyish sweater probably knitted back when Danny's grandparents were getting misspelled at Ellis Island. (Bare feet, small and smooth and pale, carelessly intimate in their visibility.) But foremost:

"What  _ did _ you mean to do, then?" Her voice sounded harsh, roughened by whiskey, cigarettes, and screaming done before her death. It sounded different, recorded, than it had on those cherished tapes.

"I meant only to  _ tell _ you. To--" Louisa's voice trembled, and she curled into herself; Danny shouldn't enjoy provoking such a break in the eerie dead calm that kept her running. "I thought you would listen to my story, tell it true. I thought a woman would understand."

"I did listen."

"Yes." Louisa's left hand bore a ring, plain gold, eroded loose by centuries of contact. "You listened. You did that, and that's more than others did."

"Then why did you leave me? You could've seen into my mind, known--"

"I can't. Surely you've been told by now that I am deficient in my senses. I haven't Lestat's strength, nor Armida's trickery. All I knew is what I hoped to save you from." Louisa's hands clasped together, squeezing. "If I had known how it would touch you--"

Danny held breath she didn't need, but Louisa refused to look at her.

"I'd have killed you then, to save you the pain of it. It would have been a mercy." 

Something spurred Danny forward until she had her angel by the shoulders, shaking her hard. "Stop it! I'm not one of your pretty dolls. I can make my own choices, I can...I," she sputtered, on the verge of angry tears. "Why won't you look at me?" She never had, after all. Only the skin of her mortality, and then the specter of failure she apparently represented. Danny, the human, was in absence.

_ (Danny, the vampire, was awfully present, her teeth on edge as Louisa's head ducked lower yet to avoid her gaze. A victim was what Louisa looked like then, timid and yielding and braced for some sort of fight. Danny had always wanted her, but before it had been as a human; she'd never really looked at that artful, weak assemblage of parts and thought of what she could do to it, how she could--) _

Suddenly it was Danny who couldn't bear to see.

And then Louisa broke the silence.

"You are always so angry with me, and you're not like the others I've known. I don't know what you want."

"I'm not angry," Danny lied in an instant, feeling the rage choking her right up to the base of her tongue.

"No?" Beautiful, beautiful eyes, fathomless. Beautiful body unfolding itself from its little chair to collapse in a kneel by the couch on which Danny sprawled (and she was the  _ guest, _ but Louisa had taken that chair--did she always--with the others she'd ‘known’--) "You seem angry. And you should be. I damned you, after all." Hands on the disintegrating cushions by Danny's arm and hip, not touching.  _ Carefully _ not making that connection.

"I'm not--" No. If she lied, she would be no different than Lestat (she should be so lucky as Lestat). "That's not why I'm angry. This is what I wanted." All the wondrous nights filled with bright and lively mortals, begging her to lose herself in the sensation of it all. If she concentrated, all the despair on the other side of the veil seemed no more than a bad dream. Death had wrapped her up carefully, preserved her. 

"You wanted it because of me. The life you could have lived, the person you could have been." 

"If I hadn't met you, I'd have died in obscurity. Nobody worth saving." She grasped Louisa's hand then, too soft between her own unnatural palms. "I owe you everything. I only ever wanted to get back to you." 

(Not quite true, not anymore. But that was a flower dying on the vine, choking her with indifference, and she fled from the ache of thinking about it). 

"I love you. Truly." 

Louisa's eyes darted back and forth, like cornered prey in a trap. "You're not the first to say so."

"I know." There must've been plenty--not just Lestat and Armida, but people when Louisa was alive. People after she died.

It took so little time to fall for her grace and sadness. Who wouldn't do her best to try and earn even an ironic smile?

"I know, but it's true. And it--hurts, that I disgust you now. You never really." Danny sat up, shoving her fists deep into the pockets of her battered denim jacket, feeling the seams strain against her knuckles. "I'm sorry. It's my problem, not yours."

She knew what it was to be pressed, pursued when her heart was already engaged. The women and (occasionally, only at the worst, most boring times) men she'd bedded, who would be so much better for her than the monster she adored.

Silence filled the room, choking. Vampires could spend whole nights without talking, she'd been told, though she'd never seen it--there had been too much of Lestat's posturing, Armida's endless questions. The coven of the articulate and blabbering. This place was heaven and hell with its solitude and isolation.

She started to stand, to excuse herself from a terrible idea, when Louisa touched her face. 

"You don't disgust me," Louisa said, slow and solemn. "I mourn your death because your light was so bright. It was rare to see. It still is."

"Still rare? Or still bright?" she asked, begging to be shot down, put out of her misery as she caught that hand and held it through a reflexive pullback.

Lids fell closed like blinds on a window, and Louisa's voice took on the hush of the confessional when she answered: "Both."

Danny leaned in with glacial slowness, fighting down the predator that wanted to rear its head and go for the exposed throat. She kissed Louisa's cold cheek, and just like that, her idol  _ shuddered. _

"I want you, Louisa," she said with lips still skimming that smooth rounded coldness, with that hand still pinned to her own face. "Always have. You did a good job that night--"

"That isn't me."

"--but that's not all I see. And you can tell me to go if you don't feel anything back, but God, you've got no idea how bright and rare  _ you _ are."

"Like any creature made to lure men to their doom."

"No." She shook her head. "No, you don't get to do that. You're--whatever you think you are, you're not seeing it right. I know." How often had she looked at her jutting hipbones in her teenage years and seen nothing but gross excess. Seen the waste that was taking her brother's place in life. "Please. Just. If you can't believe you're good, believe that I'm not lying."

Louisa answered in action, bringing their lips together in a long, slow kiss. It was no answer at all, but she was too busy melting to care.

It ended too soon, and what came after was...

Louisa drew back to come up on her knees, and Danny was already reaching out in vain pursuit when slender arms moved to slender waist crosswise, tugging wear-felted wool up from the skirt's waistband in a move almost practiced in its bashful eroticism.

Someone with so little blood in her, still blushing as she bared a smooth concave belly, soft dimpled hollow below the arch of rib. As the sweater moved upward to reveal lace and satin and seed pearls, things this woman would never bother to choose.

It was ivory, and the color didn't flatter Louisa's complexion, clashing with the hard lavender nipples and blue veins Danny saw through mesh. Ivory, her mother had always said, was for an unvirtuous bride, from someone off-put by their lover's past.

A gift: expensive lingerie from their 'Prince' herself, and Danny wanted to bare fangs at the reminder.

The sweater fell to the floor with dead leaves and dust, one cuff within the dead fireplace.

All that passionate talk, and now Danny found herself frozen, afraid the sight before her would waver and vanish. It was more than she'd dare hope for, now or ever, and she stared so intently that she felt Louisa begin to shrink away.

"If I overstepped," the woman of her dreams began to say, and Danny forced herself to move, to catch those pale arms covered in centuries of unseen bruises.

"Sorry, I--" She grinned at her own idiocy. "I just thought I was imagining things. They say people see their wildest dreams before they die, right?"

That face seemed made for sad contemplation. "We're already dead."

"I saw you when it happened," she confided; her little secret Armida would never know. "I dreamed you were welcoming me." Though at the time Louisa had been miles away, maybe even then in Lestat's arms.

Defined black brows slanted together, long lashes fell soft as butterfly wings. "Fatally in love," Louisa murmured.

"No. Don't you use  _ her _ words to describe me. Or yourself." Danny said sharply. "Not now." Not when they'd had their own, a whole book of them.

"I'm sorry." Louisa was too soft, too yielding, with her neck flexed subtly out and her eyes still on something in the distance.

"Don't--" Danny wanted so much, so much, and here it was on offer, but.

She took another kiss, so light and frightened it was childish, before pulling up on rounded shoulders. She swung to seat Louisa beside her, and Louisa morphed then, fluid, legs in their skirt coming up and body sidling up to the arm-rest. One hand went to her brow, languid. She looked like a picture, a priceless painting Armida would buy and cut to pieces before reassembling incorrectly like a puzzle.

And Danny didn't want pictures. She wanted--

They didn't do that. Couldn't.

She still wanted it, and fuck it, Louisa was with  _ her _ tonight. So after a light caress to the most beautiful rack she'd ever wanted to see out of a goddamn bra, she sat back on her heels and mimicked.

Her denim jacket and tank top didn't look so out of place next to that old sweater, and when she leaned in Louisa's eyes fixed on her at last.

There were scars that would never fade on her ribs, a tattooed sprinkling of stars, and the remains of an old, bad piercing bisecting her areola. She'd never needed a bra, and it was only old memory making her shiver at the air. The memory, and--

"May I touch you?" Louisa was looking at her like she was starving, like she'd seen something wondrous.  _ Her. _

"If you don't I might die." It was like she was a teenager again, quoting all the bad lines in the back of a theater, but Louisa only laughed.

"I'd better not fail my second chance." Louisa smiled, and it meant so many things, none of which Danny could bring herself to believe. Her hand ran over Danny’s shoulder, her arm, chaste until that soft, pale body came close. Lace and pearls scratched against her, and her head went dizzy when Louisa let her undo the hooks and toss the gaudy thing to the ground.  _ Prized over the great Lestat. _

Louisa's touch was gentle, tentative, as though she feared causing Danny some kind of pain. Barely hovering. Tortuous and delicious on vampire nerves. Danny mimicked it, liking how Louisa leaned in, how she wiggled her hips like they could still do what mortals did when Danny squeezed or pressed a nipple down with her nailbit thumb.

And then when Danny kissed her neck, she became a statue. No, a ragdoll, there in Danny's arms: a study in controlled pliability as she rolled her spine and pressed their breasts together.

"Louisa," she whispered against damp skin, intoxicated at the feel of that pulse against her lips. Aching to taste. "Oh, sweetheart--"

_ (For years she'd associated Louisa with silver-screen beauties, the sad smoky glamour girls she grew up wanting and fearing. Bogie would've called her sweetheart, holding her and knowing he couldn't keep her because the world would fall apart too soon.) _

"Oui, Danny. You can--" But she shook, and not just with desire. Even through Danny's careful walls, she could feel a resignation, a fear, too loud to be blocked. "Please, Danny. Do not tease."

She tried to ignore it at first, sucking a hard bruise against Louisa's neck and thinking about the sweet pulse underneath. But the longer she waited the stronger that spike of fear grew, quailing under her touch even though the body didn't move. She was allowed, she'd been given permission, and yet--

"What do you want?" she asked, ever eager to prostrate herself before her angel. Adoring and fearing. 

"You wish," a catch in that voice like music, a held note before the tumult, "I know what comes next for our kind. It's alright." 

"But what do you  _ want?" _ she insisted. "All  _ I _ want is to touch you. So tell me where." Neitjer strictly true nor a lie, suspended in-between as they always seemed to be.

Louisa stared like a trapped wild thing, confusion turning to frustration and then quickly masked.

Not quickly enough.

"Please," Louisa said, melting again. Appealing. Creeping forward to straddle Danny's lap. "I only wish to make you happy." Bad news, bad news--like this was a gift or a trade--"Do not mock my ignorance."

And how the Hell do you persuade a woman? How do you get her to want you?  They were dead, they couldn't do  _ that;  _ no reason to try given the pleasure of the drink (so said Armida), but her gauze skirt was so soft and flowing and easy to lift. So Danny kissed the sternum shielding slow-beating heart, mouthed at a nipple, and sneaked her fingers up through the ticklish hairs of a tensed thigh to rest at the very edge of what she'd dreamed about for years.

So pure, her love. Fuck yeah it was pure, as she teased at and parted curls she couldn't see, as she made Louisa's breath catch with tiny bloodless nibbles at her breasts.

There had been no way to have anything  _ but _ purity, the way they'd been. Longing like chivalry had never died, questing for something worth bringing to lay at Louisa's feet.  And here they were, and here she was fucking it up. Following old mortal guidelines instead of what she knew she was ‘supposed’ to do. 

Her fingers ran along soft, cool folds, sparking a shudder. Good enough if it caused some release, if it eased Louisa's fear of whatever this was. She pulled her fingers back--

They were damp. With  _ blood _ of all things. 

"Holy shit," she breathed, forgetting the decorum of the role she was playing in favor of plain awe. "Louisa." She held up her hand. "You didn't happen to...cut yourself or something, did you?"

"No." Louisa looked puzzled, and what a joy it was for both of them to be in the dark together. On even footing at last. 

"Can I, uh," she blushed, because this was Louisa. Darling, prim Louisa who apparently had no idea what happened to her own parts during sex. "Can I look?" 

Louisa stood, stepping out of her skirt with that same practicality that took Danny's breath. Long legs with soft, dark hair. An unknown scar on her hip.

Nothing at all covering her.

"You don't wear panties?" Stupid to ask now, when she'd just had her hand up there like a football player on Prom night, but there it was.

"They don't serve much purpose. There were a pair to match the brassiere, if you would prefer--"

"No!" Louisa went wary again at the half-desperate cry, and Danny longed to gentle her. "No, I--I want to see you."

Louisa nodded, girlish, obedient, and that sick feeling returned.

"If that's alright with you."

"Of course." So guileless, with a hand over the black triangle of hair like a Venus.

"They get in the way, right?" Danny tried.

"Not so bad as what we once wore. You have no idea the work involved in undressing then." Shy, testing even, as Danny pulled her in again by the other hand.

The only borderline 'academic' piece Danny ever wrote was a retrospective on foundation garments worn by women from 1750 onward. She knew, had viewed drawings and even seen a few in person. She'd spent nights fingering herself to the thought of the tiny waist squeezed tighter yet, that soft voice high and breathy with the crush of canvas or whalebone or steel. Dreamed of taking it off, freeing that body and soothing the tiny red spots and parallel lines of pinched flesh until they were sensitized for a wholly different reason.

And there was blood on her fingers that she wanted to taste. Blood she could smell.

She could make red marks of her own; it wouldn't be hard, not with Armida's stronger blood--

_ A sudden vision assailed her, wrenchingly vivid, of stripes of blood on fair skin, of handprints and knives and bandages. Back alleys and a darkened staircase. All muddled, all strange. _

She shook it off, the predator within. The sick, sick fantasies.

"Your hand," Louisa said at last, her finger smudging her own blood once removed.

"Oh, right." Like waking from a nightmare she couldn't shake. "I can--"

"Let me." Louisa pulled in the hand that had captured her, pressed Danny's bloody fingers to her lips, and  _ oh. _

She really would die like this, feeling those silken lips take her in, seeing Louisa's eyes close in concentration while her tongue stroked and circled Danny's fingertips. She didn't even realize she'd been moaning. That strange and desperate sound couldn't have been her. Not over something so little as that. 

_ More blood. More sensation. Anything to see that placid expression flower into something new, any sign of life and regard. She could tear them both open and they'd survive it, drowning in blood, and then... _

"Are you bleeding?" she managed, half delirious. She was sure she could smell it on the air, but it couldn't be that simple. Everyone thought they'd invented sex the first time, but it was never true.

"Of course." Louisa said, straightforward. "I always bleed, ever since the first time." Jesus Christ, whatever that meant, Danny knew she'd been with men after Paul's accident and maybe it hadn't just been tawdry, maybe they hadn't been gentle enough, maybe they'd hurt her--"Is that not usual?"

"Oh, sweetheart," Danny whispered, leaning out and pulling those hips in. She could  _ smell _ it, could see a trickle on the thigh. "Not for mortals, it isn't."

And Louisa whimpered when she dipped two fingers back between the labia, coated her fingers in slickness and sought an engorged clit (like the nipples, maybe, always hard after they died, always painfully sensitive--)

This wasn't supposed to be possible. It wasn't--their kind didn't fuck. That was the truth, the law, the most basic of the basics, and here Danny was bringing gasps and moans to Louisa's dead lips by playing with her dead pussy.

_ Lied _ to about her body, how it worked and what it did. What was possible or permissible, given anatomy and desire, and what else was new?

And when the anger flared again, Louisa's eyes fluttered open an instant behind, and she froze. Bit her lip.

"Will you... hurt me there?"

"No!" Out it came with disgust, all of her ugly little thoughts made manifest, and it took long seconds to backpedal. "I mean...do you  _ want _ me to?" 

"No." Almost that same emphasis, but softer. Resigned again. "But it is in our nature. Violence is how we love." 

"Not me," she swore, even if it wasn't true. Even if she'd come here to stab Armida in the heart as much as to worship. "If it hurts, tell me. I'll stop. I want to make you feel good." 

"You were making an excellent start of it." Danny loved that smile, the one she'd seen and thought she imagined in the haze of that bare little room in San Francisco. 

"Well then." She calculated every move thrice, afraid to crush that small gift. "Can I kiss you?"

"Yes." Louisa started to lean down, but Danny was faster, pressing her  face against those soft curls and setting to work with her long tongue. Louisa went ramrod straight against her, her deep groan ending in a squeak of surprise.

The angle was horrible, but Danny groaned back, half-crazy with the taste. She'd always drawn a line at getting her Red Wings when she was alive, no matter how many times Armida manipulated her into rooms with women on the rag. There was only one disease she'd ever  _ set out _ to get from blood.

Now--

It coated her tongue, thick like the memory of honey, and as golden. It wasn't the same as the drink, but sweeter, softer. Languid in the pleasure it gave her, when she was supposed to be doing the pleasuring.

She'd heard that voice gasp before, when she was stunned and on the edge of death. Life. She'd forgotten it, in the haze of everything else from that night, but this was what Louisa had sounded like feeding.

From  _ her. _

She pulled back. "C'mon, this'll be easier if we..."

Dilated green eyes showed more hunger than sense as she put Louisa back on the couch and went to her own knees. At that angle, with the moonlight and the few candles, she could see all she wanted. She hoisted a leg over her shoulder and kissed the thigh, where a pulse thundered in her ear as she returned to her task.

It had been ages, her appetite for sex dulled in the pursuit of blood those last few years before she died. And after, she'd put it aside in favor of basking in the kill, the supposed apex of experience (it was true that this lacked the thrill, the completion of sucking a life down to its last morsels, knowing a body completely as it turned cold and empty; but this was something they could both survive). 

Louisa trembled with the effort of trying to stay still, sitting stiff where Danny had posed her and yet trembling with every deep kiss. Each time she slipped she'd fight to return to where she'd been, as if afraid disobedience would mean the end of things. 

Danny hesitated in bringing her hands in, remembering the scraps Louisa had intimated in her tale, the depths she had spoken with one word of confusion. Who knew what ghosts penetration would rouse. 

"Danny," Louisa gasped, and it wasn't until Louisa actively pushed at her that she realized she was being stopped. "Please. I..."

"You want me to stop?" What had she done, that this was her punishment?

"I want to try."

And Christ, if she hadn't ever been wet in her life, she was now. She could feel it, on her thighs, probably staining the Hell out of her torn jeans, and she scooted forward to press her face to Louisa's hollow belly.

(Weird shape, that little dip--not the convex bump most women had.)

"I'd love that. I'd love--but you haven't finished yet."

"I'm sorry?" Half question, half sincere apology, and it made Danny want to dig her nails in and  _ shred. _ Instead she traced kisses along Louisa's hipbones and breathed through it.

"You haven't had an orgasm." Clear, concise language: not just for news writing. One of the bitches she'd known at a punk collective in London had made them sit in a circle and say words, clinical and slang, slurs and basics, past where they had meaning or shame. Said that as women, they needed to ‘own’ their sexuality.

She'd OD'd a couple of years later, but Danny would remember her until the end of time.

"It felt good." Louisa said, tangling her fingers in Danny's purple-streaked hair and stroking her shoulder.

"I know it did. And I want that. But it can be more. Have you ever  _ had _ one?"

"When I was alive, men did not--appeal." Danny could practically  _ feel _ the blush, though her eyes were lazily shut at the soft intimacy of the moment.  _ Words _ from Louisa; a past she'd never tell anyone else.

This was how Danny'd fallen.

"And girls..." A hint of excitement, a hushed confiding tone. "I would not have known how. This is new to me."

"Jesus." Two hundred twenty-five  _ years. _ She should be proud to have beaten Lestat to something, but fuck.

"Of course I've had...experiences." Almost cute how she rushed to justify herself, except that it was mostly just sad. 

"But not like this." Nothing enjoyable. Nothing free of pain. 

"No." 

What had she ever done to deserve this gift (to profit off one woman's centuries of misery)? She blew a breath out between clenched teeth. "Okay. Then just...let me take care of you. Okay? We can, uh, I mean--after. If you still want to."

Slowly, Louisa laid back down. "Alright." There was blood on her thighs, and anticipation in the tremor of her frame. 

Danny kneeled as if before a holy relic, new apprehension heavy on her shoulders. She'd never been someone's first. Plenty of lasts, sure, but.

She was way better at being a fuck-up. 

She traced the trickle of Louisa's blood with her tongue, flitting over that tight little nub only to dart away again. Cautious and slow, her fingers massaged around Louisa's entrance. How did you figure out what someone wanted when they had no idea how to tell you?

She never listened to Louisa's mind. It was too open, shielded from nothing and no one, and Louisa couldn't listen back (though she could apparently sense anger well enough. Survival mechanism just like a human.) Unfair to take advantage, though Danny knew the others did it as they pleased, Armida calming and soothing Louisa's sharpness whenever they met, Maria following and watching her whenever they happened to be in the same city. Lestat would've used it if only she could.

Nothing much had changed since the nights before the concert, when Danny had lain dying and dreaming of her Beautiful Death.

(Yeah, maybe she  _ had _ been 'fatally in love' after all. Fuck Lestat anyway, for never giving Louisa what Danny would.)

But Louisa was so rigid, body not reclined but posed, and Danny wanted those little circling movements from their makeout session back. With each flick of her tongue muscles tightened more, thighs trembling with strain, until Danny whispered:

"Relax. You're allowed to move. Whatever you like."

The sound Louisa made then was a release, legs parting loose and rubbery and tissues softening to let free another gush of blood to coat Danny's fingers and tongue and chin, and this was supposed to be about Louisa, but that taste, that voice--her tongue quested for more, face buried deep in black curls and pale pinkish flesh and the blood she'd craved for nineteen years.

'Eating out,' indeed.

The blood increased from a trickle to a steady flow, Louisa's sighs enough to leave Danny wet and messy at both ends, high on the unreality of what she was witnessing. 

A sudden tension racked Louisa's form, stiff and nervous in time with her heavy pants. "Danny, I-I think I--"

"It's okay," she soothed, "let go. Let it happen. It's supposed to--" how often must the others have said that? Those very same words. 

Blood drenched her face and trickled down her chest, that gentle drawling voice escalating into a shriek as Louisa's hips spasmed and shook. And Danny gave in, touching herself with hands covered in the smell and damp of Louisa, the sounds of that perfect voice. 

She rode her own hand as if this were just another fantasy, eyes screwed shut, and it took the shock of touch to remind her she wasn't alone. 

"Sorry, I just. You were so.." she shrank in on herself, preparing to be an object of disgust. 

Louisa's eyes were bright and glittering, her mouth drawn in a small smile. "Let me help you." Southern hospitality at its finest.

And then Louisa slid down, off the couch, onto the motheaten carpet by the darkened hearth with Danny. She kissed Danny's lips before moving on to lick at her jaw, tasting the smeared evidence of her own pleasure and humming softly. She went lower, to where Danny's breasts had finger-painted patterns of blood; her hands followed them like a diagram of dance steps and her tongue cleaned it all away.

It didn't feel clean. It felt so wonderfully dirty, earthy, and Danny fell back. A stray dead leaf crunched under her shoulder. Louisa crouched between her legs, looming, primitive; a witch or a succubus, overwhelming.

And then Louisa's beautiful clean hands were at her belt, green eyes flashing as she drew the jeans down and off first one leg, then the other.

She stared at Danny's lanky nakedness with lips parted, two fingers rising to cover her mouth ladylike.

"Oh, my." It should have been flat, but that little Southern-Belle expression of admiration hit every button Danny had. Made her feel more beautiful than she had in decades. "Danny. You look  _ divine."  _ And then Louisa drew her other hand featherlight along the dip above Danny's hipbone to the crease between leg and thigh, and Danny bucked like she'd been shot.

Somehow she'd ended up as the teacher, yet she was beyond words, squirming as Louisa began a slow, methodical exploration as she might with one of her books. She was deliberate as if she felt nothing, and yet careful to repeat every action that got so much as a twinge from Danny (and that was all of them, the mere thought of being touched by her Death, she could come right now). 

When her hands were bloody and slick Louisa brought them to her face, scenting with that animal impulse. She seemed to lose herself for a moment in the taste, as overwhelming as she'd described the swoon itself. 

And then she lowered herself onto her stomach, pressing her face to the dripping mess of Danny's sex with perfect fascination. 

"Is this alright?" she asked, and Danny could only whimper, lust short-circuiting every functional higher nerve in her brain.

It wasn't the best head Danny'd ever gotten, but it  _ was, _ because it was Louisa: gentle, careful and testing. No practice to it, too much focus on the vagina and not enough on the clit, but that tongue lapped up every drop of her need.

"Tell me, Danny," Louisa said, and Danny almost screamed at the loss of contact. "Tell me what to do."

Unable to speak, Danny grabbed one bracing hand instead, rode out the reflexive flinch and met the flicker of fear dead-on. She pulled it around and planted it on her clit, nasty and exposed like she was in a show, but when she started to rub Louisa got the idea. Kept at it for a moment, and then, carefully watching Danny's face for some sort of test or dare, leaned back down to replace fingers with lips and tongue.

Good thing the carpet was already ruined.

_ Dead, they were dead, _ she told herself over and over again; there was no reason for it to feel so good. But here she was, writhing like she was a virgin again, back in the supply closet behind the art room and being told to keep another secret. 

The feeling plateaued, Louisa pulling back in hesitation. "Harder," Danny coached, using her own fingers to pinch and press and finally to leave bloody streaks in Louisa's hair. She wasn't a believer, but the white in her vision was like that damn tunnel everyone was always talking about (she hadn't seen it, just the dark and Armida's voice).

They looked like a crime scene, both of them. If only Lestat could see it. 

Louisa was leaning over her, brows together. "Are you alright?"

"Better." She'd probably get hit by a truck or something later, because this had to be the peak of her existence.

"I'm glad." Smiling, Louisa looked like the bestseller she was, black-and-white-and-red all over. She picked her way daintily out from between Danny's legs to crawl up, ultimately curling in the hollow of her body, under the arc of her outstretched arm. A millimeter of air between them at most, but not touching.

_ Why? _

She looked so cold in that fetal ball, modestly covering her torso with her knees, and she squeaked when Danny rolled to embrace her, slinging an arm and leg around and nuzzling at her ear. Choppy-cut hair tickled her nose, smelling of wax and rain.

"D-Danny." She arched, letting Danny's hand slip down onto her ribcage, just below her breast, and she rubbed her ass back like there was something there to grind against. "Do you still feel... needful?"

"I could be with you a million times and still need you," Danny whispered, enjoying the subliminal shiver occasioned by her cold breath and the twitch of her fingers. "I love you."

"Then do it."

"You sure?" The flinch Louisa had displayed earlier was gone, but the memory of it still lingered. "I don't wanna hurt you, or..."

"I want you to." They were slotted flush against each other now, rocking in slow unspoken rhythm.

She should've pushed. Should've stopped. What she did was bury her face in that slim shoulder and bite down, riding a second high from the moment that fine blood hit her tongue.

Louisa's mind was an ocean, dark and impenetrable and glinting from within with unspent knowledge. Instinct told her to dive in and rend it asunder, demand to know, but she let herself sink instead, letting the dark calm engulf and drown her alongside the lulling drum of Louisa's heart.

It completed a circle begun long years ago: this woman in her arms, as open and raw now as Danny had been then. Neck as tender, swoon as deep, beloved as every victim was. More.

Special, chosen and stalked. Desired.

Danny's hands roamed in patterns half-remembered, their bodies separate from their minds yet tied to them, and that perfect velvety darkness welcomed her in. Flashes came here and there, of a pretty, lively little thing, passionate and strange.

_ A tall, slim girl with pale grey-blonde hair sat at the bar drinking a soda pop she'd nurse all night, scoping out the other women. Her thin mouth asked for stories while her remarkable eyes asked for something else, and she was so sure. So modern. _

_ Boots and silk hose, fine flimsy underthings that suited the time; cape and wide-brimmed hat to fall low over her face, her sinful painted mouth. Her hair, a woman's crowning glory, left long for one night. A pretty trap, all the bait she had, and it was evil to do this but she so wanted to talk. It had been years, maybe fifteen, maybe thirty, since she’d had a conversation with anyone. _

_ She was so lonely. _

_ And then she was so hungry, and she'd held the girl tight. She'd touched her and tasted her desire and it was wonderful, wonderful-- _

_ And Danny'd been lovely, all shiny and new like a copper penny with her pink cheeks and human sweat in that non-air-conditioned room on Divisadero Street, smoking just to look older. She'd been lovely. She'd been  _ alive.

There were tears on both their faces when Danny pulled back. She'd pulled her Louisa-- _ hers _ \--flush against her and slipped a knee between her legs. There was more blood there, sticky and hot as Louisa's chest heaved beneath her hands.

_ Drink, _ she said without speaking, tilting her head as best she could, offering herself. Louisa seemed bewildered at first, unsure, and then she wrapped Danny in an embrace smelling still of lace and mildewing pages. 

Louisa was emboldened by the bite, hands sliding down to squeeze Danny's ass and grind them closer together, as if proximity might melt all time and distance between them. Danny saw herself refracted, here in this room and decades ago, young and dead. 

She tried to give Louisa her dearest memories, her angel surrounded by that glow of soft sureness and perfect pain 

_ (and in between slipped a small, soft hand stroking her hair; dressing her, laughing and destroying her appliances at four in the morning and baring small, deadly fangs that said  _ run, run _ \--) _

She jerked away, tearing the perfect puncture marks into something ugly. Fucked it up again, and even still Louisa was holding her, apologizing like  _ she'd _ done something wrong. 

"It's fine, it's fine," she lied. "It was my fault. Just, would you hold me?"

"Yes, certainly," Louisa said, still looking on strangely. But her flesh felt nearly warm with the meager infusion of Danny's blood, and she was as good as her word. "I'm so sorry to have caused pain. I do not usually...that is to say, others have not...encouraged me...to take their blood."

(Danny'd had to spend ages transcribing her, rendering every hesitant, thinking pause down on paper and then striking it so the words flowed smoothly. And then she'd still spent every night listening to copies of her tapes, the originals locked away in a safety deposit box while she walked the nighttime streets of San Francisco and New Orleans and, later, Paris. She'd  _ stalked _ her victim.)

"Others." Her voice was bitter; Louisa's arms tensed again, but held onto Danny nonetheless, like a bomb that might go off with too much jostling.

"Never mind. I will try to do better, if you allow me."

"Louisa. Louisa, please, it's  _ me, _ okay?" She should stop touching and allow Louisa to get some distance, but here she was instead cupping that face in her hands, trying to force eye contact only to see lids fall shut. "I already know, and sweetheart, I  _ love _ you."

Wrong thing to say; Louisa shuddered. "I know."

"I don't want to hurt you!" Lies; somewhere deep down she wanted to rend and tear, drink her down to a bundle of bones, but true so far as what she'd actually  _ do. _

"I understand. I won't make you. I'm sorry."

"No, it's not--" she broke off with a frustrated groan. "It's not you. It was my fault. And Louisa, no matter what. Nobody should hurt you. You know that, right?" Giving a lecture to a woman five generations her senior at least.

"Forgive the old habits." Louisa followed the non-answer with a kiss to Danny's forehead. "This has been a wonderful evening." Retreating again. Danny wasn't good enough to see those inner thoughts, and damn her for having just enough ethics not to go looking. Every second Louisa held her she could feel the wall going up, and now she was the one pressing closer, trying to erase the boundary between them with simple skin to skin contact.

What would she even do, if someone found them. If she had to fight (she couldn't, she was weak). If she had to explain (she couldn't, or those ugly truths would start spilling out).

If she had to surrender this unbreakable creature back to the ones who had bent her for centuries...

"You frighten me, Louisa," she said into the thin skin over the collarbone. "You're so strong, I feel like you could go on forever and never be happy."

Never even try.

Danny almost wanted to stay like this all night, all day, wrapped in one another under the window. Let the others come and find a pile of mingled ash, clothes scattered, hair shining; let all that tell the tale.

But she wasn't a believer, and Louisa was, and neither of them expected fluffy clouds and togetherness at the end of that road.

"I've been happy." Her voice sounded distant again. "It's not a constant state, Danny; it's moments. Surely you know that, with what you gave me of Armida?"

"What?"

"Her kindness; her love. It mattered, did it not?"

"I--" It  _ had, _ was the damnedest thing. Did. There was no sorting through how she felt about her maker. "It's not supposed to!"

"They're wounded, just as we are. Scars carry across centuries. Do you think you're the first girl I led to death?"

No, no, after all that. After feeling like she was really special and needed."Stop it. You can't mean this. You don't. She's got you brainwashed or something." 

"I have forgiven Lestat for the hurts we inflicted on one another. If I couldn't, it would eat me alive long before eternity was up. Here. Didn't I tell you we were monstrous?"

"So that's it." Danny sat up, tasting something sour in her mouth and looking away. "You let me come here, pour out my fuckin' soul, and--"  _ ‘made love with me’ _ was too cliche; it stuck in her throat. Louisa picked up the pause.

"--Seduced you? Like what I am?"

"Were you even a virgin? Or was that just a line for the lapsed Catholic?" It was petty, and not remotely the point, but Danny'd always fought mean.

Cool, collected tone:

"Danny, my love, I thought you clever. I told you of the first man who ever ruined me long ago."

Fuck the flatboatman she'd been screwing when Lestat found her; fuck that clinically coy description.

"You know what I mean."

"I do. Does it anger you?"  Something weird in that well-known voice made Danny whip her head around, and the measuring expression wasn't hidden fast enough. She wanted to pounce, to shake Louisa, to kiss her 'till she bled and drink the truth out of her--

"You're fucking with me."

"I was sincere in my affections. My desire to be with you was earnest," That green gaze was suddenly unbearable, heavier than a thousand leagues of ocean. "What did you imagine? That you alone would free me from a dreadful prison I didn't know I was in?"

Yes, and damn her for not following the script. For looking so steady when Danny felt like she was falling into an abyss. She staggered to her feet, groping for her ruined clothes. She was still wearing her socks, for fuck's sake. 

"It will be dawn soon." Still that steady certainty. "You shouldn't go out as you are."

She'd had weirder walks of shame, but. "Care to lend me some pants?" she said, looking at the murder scene in her jeans.

"No." She looked up sharply; Louisa wet her lips. "You must realize, Danny, that my experiences are limited. And the four I've been loved by all chose me. Thrice, I chose them as well, but the weight of that was less."

_ Four, four--Lestat, Claude, Armida; who-- _

"I do not doubt your love, but fear the forms it may take. You are foreign to me; your pleasures are strange. You were raised by Armida, but do not care to do what she did. You have anger in you, like Lestat; can you blame my testing it?" Louisa, naked and bloody as the day she was born in 1766 (Danny had found the baptismal certificate, along with the family tomb and a miniature portrait--), walked to the window and stared out, back a graceful organic curve. Art Nouveau, framed against the greying sky. "You do not recall the males to me, but still. I am weak, and I would choose you, if you'd have it so. And I'd rather not lend you pants to flee in."

"So that's...that's," she flailed against Louisa's calm, her anger deflating without an opponent. "You're saying I'm supposed to be just  _ fine _ with the fact that you used me?"

"I am." Those innocent eyes weren't at all. They'd grown seeing. "You're like your maker, dearest. You wear your hurts more plainly than you think." Louisa turned just enough, her gaze a glint amid the shadows. "You could have hurt me and didn't. That's enough." 

"I, you," all those words she'd cultivated left her in a frustrated scream, and she collapsed on the ruined couch, drawing her knees up to her chest. "Did you even really come?" Was she versed in faking orgasms too?

"You gave me a gift I wasn't expecting." Louisa came no closer, but Danny had the reward of her full attention. "You're cleverer than all of us in some ways."

"You're fucked in the head."

"I'm a temptress. A witch." Twist of full lips, still smeared with Danny's blood. "A whore, yes? Here to be kept. And being kept by someone sweet--"

There was a scrabbling at the edge of Danny's mind; she shoved it away, locked down harder.

"I chose you first, and you didn't just use me. What you liked to do was--good." The word was shaped as though in a foreign tongue. "So  _ forgive _ my honesty. Forgive the fact that your pride is hurt. Take who I am, not what you'd shape me into, if you can." She swallowed. "Or leave me today, and we'll forget this conversation ever happened. I can be who you want, whatever that means."

She saw it, then, the subtle shift of the form, from a loose-limbed unconscious grace into something deliberately sensual. Inviting. A dimming of the features, blanking of the eyes. Lower lip sucked in and bitten, body in three-quarter shadow.

And that wasn't what Danny had in fallen love with.

The edged, bitter-smiling, truthful-and-lying storyteller had been.

"Do you even have room?" Danny said at last, eyes down and away. 

Louisa smiled, or so Danny imagined. What she felt was a hand on her shoulder, and then came the sounds of floorboards ripping away. The center of the room peeled back to reveal loose earth, soft and dark like in the novels Louisa had derided. "You may stay with me, if you wish it. You'll find little protection up here." 

Buried in the earth, dying with ritual precision each night and remembering their lungs took no breath. The thought twisted her guts. 

But.

Always ‘but.’ 

"I don't think I can bury myself."

"It takes practice," Louisa, the former claustrophobic, acknowledged. "Our evil can be difficult to comprehend." 

There again, that talk of evil. Believed deep down to her bones, it seemed, even if she'd shed the practice of trying to spare human lives. Maybe because of it. Danny's legs shook as she approached the grave, and she felt the world wobble and slide out from under her as she stared into it.

_ Fatally in love. _

Louisa had said she led Danny to her grave. Danny'd sworn she wanted to join Louisa there.

She was a multi-millionaire, and it was time to put her money where her too-big mouth was.

_ (Armida would be pissed, or worried, or indifferent. Armida might be angry at her, might show she cared still, if Danny didn't come home.) _

"We'll get clean tomorrow, right?"

"The dirt doesn't stick to us." Louisa swiped a hand over a patch of dried blood, sending it flaking off to dust the black earth.

Danny didn't answer, just bent down and stopped a breath from Louisa's mouth. Waiting.

And then Louisa gave her a kiss and pulled her smiling into death.


End file.
